I sat cross-legged on the ridiculously overpriced Alderaanian meditation mat Bail had lent me, Hett's lightsaber balanced across my palms like it might bite me. Which, given its track record, wasn't entirely impossible.
It had been nearly a full day since the Great Fartpocalypse, and I was still smelling phantom ass every time I inhaled too deeply. After that purple-assed war criminal had bolted deeper into the Scythe like it owned the place, I'd spent four goddamn hours trying to evict it.
Hyper Perception let me pinpoint exactly where the little bastard was hiding—curled up behind the auxiliary power coupling like a scaly, red-eyed gremlin—but good luck yanking it out with the Force.
The ship's guts were a nightmare of delicate wiring, coolant piping, and half a dozen systems I couldn't even name without sounding like a pretentious engineer. Rip one wrong bundle and I'd be looking at days of repairs in places no human arm was meant to reach.
And yeah, I was leaving the Scythe parked here on Alderaan for the foreseeable future, but that didn't mean I wanted to hand leave behind an flying hazard. Not to mention that it needs to be moved from here to which ever secret facility its to be stored, but even more, who knew when I might need this black rust bucket again?
But every time I tried to pin the little shit in place with the Force, it treated the threat like a dinner bell. Fart. Then fart. Then a wet, bubbling faaaaart
The creature's entire evolutionary strategy was chemical warfare. It was the perfect definition of a space skunk. Nature's middle finger in rabbit-rat form.
Even now, despite me being extremely careful and burning through nearly two full bottles of Leia's room freshener (borrowed indefinitely, don't @ me, your Highness), there was still this lingering under-layer of stench baked into the ventilation.
Like the ship had been marinated in concentrated trauma. I was half-convinced the smell had achieved sentience and was following me around out of spite.
It was only later that evening, after I'd finally cornered the little bastard in the engine cowling and yeeted it into the gardens with the Force, that Bail told me what it was. An Alderaanian Vrelt. Cute name for something that looks like someone crossbred a rabbit, a rat, and a chemical weapon.
Scaly patches, beady red eyes, and a bulbous purple rear end packed with neurotoxic aerosol glands. Apparently they were imported as exotic pets like a thousand years ago, escaped, went feral, and now half the nobility's estates have "Vrelt containment protocols."
I spent ten straight minutes seeing every awkward middle-school moment from both my lives while gagging in the cockpit. Perfect. Ten-out-of-ten biosphere design. Would not recommend.
Anyway. Since I was officially abandoning the Scythe here (at least until I figured out what the hell to do with the thing), I needed new wheels. Bail—bless the man's ridiculously generous heart—offered to get me one as a "token of gratitude for saving my daughter." His exact words.
When the Senator of the wealthiest pacifist planet in the galaxy tells you to pick a ship, you do shouldn't really hold back. He'd slid me a datapad with an off-the-books catalog that made my inner gremlin salivate. There were yachts, gunships, and—I shit you not—capital ships on that list. I'm talking vessels that could glass a continent if you were feeling dramatic.
If Arachnae and I weren't basically two units crammed into one scrawny twelve-year-old body, I would've absolutely tried to talk him into handing over one of the heavy cruisers. "Yes hello, I am smol, please give me death star." Sadly, practicality won. I needed something that could be flown solo (or with one murder-spider droid) without needing a crew of twelve.
So I picked the Nebula Runner—a sleek hybrid sitting right in the sweet spot between a personal fighter and a light freighter. Lots of off-market mods, especially on the shielding and weapons package.
Apparently it used to belong to a wealthy pirate crew before Alderaan's "privateers" confiscated it. The thing had concealed quad lasers, reinforced military-grade deflectors, and a hyperspace motivator that could probably outrun most Imperial pickets.
It was going to take one or two days to ferry it over from the lunar facility where they'd been keeping it, but I could wait.
Today, I had decided to focus on this little bastard instead.
I turned the lightsaber slowly in my hands, thumb brushing over the emitter. Obi-Wan's is right about this thing in regards to the danger it possesses and all that.
The kyber crystal inside had been bled, corrupted by the dark side by Hett himself over years. When using a light saber, its not just an weapon in your hand. The force in your body forms an circuit with the crystal within, and by extension the whole light saber.
Your thoughts flow into it the same way as its own energies flow back into you. This was the reason why for a jedi, the lightsaber was as if his limb. And why younglings are taken to find their own crystal. An unused crystal is like a blank slate upon which you imprint your mind and self.
Comparatively, for Bled Crystals like this, every time it was ignited, its darkness flowed back into you, feeding subtle distortions into the Force. Use it too often, and it wouldn't just be a tool anymore. It would start shaping the one wielding it.
I had already had enough of behavioral manipulation with the black mental parasite to know exactly where that path led.
That wasn't an option. And with how for the foreseeable future I couldn't really go around Hoth and Ilum to find the crystal calling for me, the only way to fight any other siths or sith wannabes was to have an lightsaber at hand that I could use without falling into pyschosis.
So this left only one solution.
Purification. light-side ritual to heal the crystal, bleed out the hate, and turn that screaming red into something closer to what a kyber was supposed to be. I'd gotten the theory from Obi-Wan, but hearing the principles and actually doing the damn thing were two different beasts. Like reading about brain surgery versus sticking your hands in someone's skull.
Still, there was only one way forward.
"Well," I muttered under my breath, "guess we're doing this."
The lightsaber lifted from my hands, hovering at eye level as it rotated slowly in the air. I exhaled, letting my awareness narrow, focusing my perception onto it.
I reached into the weapon, sensing its structure piece by piece. Then with careful threads of telekinesis I began taking the saber apart. First the emitter, the power cell. The focusing lenses. The hilt itself, etched with symbols that might mean something or might just be random dents.
Then, carefully, I began to dismantle it.
Components separated with surgical precision, each piece drifting into place around me until the weapon became a floating constellation of lethal parts.
At the center of it all—
The Crimson Crystal.
It hovered at the center of the disassembled weapon like a tiny, furious heart. I could feel the Force flowing through it in a way that had nothing to do with midi-chlorians.
It wasn't alive the way we were alive, but it still had this… presence. An aura of raw, screaming life. Pain. Rage. Years of hate baked into its lattice by a certain asshole who'd wanted a weapon that would never forget what had been done to it. It really was something about Siths capacity to rage out and hate things.
Even now it hurt my head just looking at it. I swallowed the air in my mouth, feeling a bit less confident than before.
"Alright, you screaming red son of a bitch," I whispered. "Let's see if we can't fix you before you finish fixing me."
The crystal pulsed once, as if daring me to try.
...
...
Feeling your consciousness immerse into a kyber crystal was a unique experience.
It wasn't a place, yet I could feel myself not inside myself. The closest comparison would be when I'd peered into my own mind for the first time, but with even the spatial dimensions removed. It was just a dimension of emotions.
No up. No down. No here or there. Just… feeling. Raw and infinite and suffocating.
And the crystal was screaming.
It wasn't with sound—nothing so merciful as that. It was a psychic wail that clawed at the edges of my awareness, dragging fragments of memory with it. Hett's memories. Broken shards of his life, infused into the crystal through years of bleeding rituals.
I saw flashes. Brief. Chaotic. Contextless.
A desert at sunset. Sand stained red.
A Jedi Temple corridor. Bodies on the ground.
A face—human, Tusken, something in between—twisted in anguish.
A lightsaber igniting. Again. And again. And again.
I couldn't make sense of the images, but I could feel the emotions behind them. Rage. Sorrow. Hate. Pain. All of it mixed together into a toxic slurry that wanted to flow into me, to fill the cracks in my own mind and make a home there.
I fought it back. Gritted my teeth (metaphorically, since I didn't exactly have a body here) and shoved the feedback away from the fragile boundaries of my own psyche.
But beneath all the rage, beneath the fractured memories and the Dark Side corruption, there was something else.
Pain. Pure, simple, agonizing pain.
The crystal itself was crying.
If I had to describe a kyber crystal, the closest approximation would be… an infant. A child with no concept of anything but peace and joy. Attuned to the Force in its purest form, existing in harmony with the galaxy.
And to make it bleed? To corrupt it into a weapon of the Dark Side?
It was like traumatizing a child. Pouring hate and fear and suffering into the innocent thing until it cracked, until the light inside twisted into something entirely different.
Utterly loathsome. Utterly cruel.
But well. Siths gonna be Sithing around.
"Alright," I whispered into the void. "Let's get you some therapy."
...
...
I didn't realize how long I'd been under. Time stopped meaning anything inside the crystal's scream. I just kept working, trying to smooth out the hate, to find the original shape of the peace buried under all that pain.
It was going... okay? Ish? It was a slow process and I wasn't really an prodigy at something like. I expected that it was gonna take many more sitting before it would be purified. But still, I kept at it.
Somewhere in between I was losing myself in the flow when the world around me suddenly shifted,
The suffocation was the first thing I felt.
As if someone suddenly threw me in to the ocean's depth, a sudden, heavy pressure enveloped my mind and body,
W-What?
Like sinking into black water, miles deep, the weight of it crushing from every direction. The cold that followed had nothing to do with temperature. It was the cold of absolute emptiness. Of a life that had burned away everything but rage.
And then I felt it.
Something gaze turn toward me.
I could't describe the terror that I felt. It was primal. It made the kyber's pain feel like a playground scuffle. This presence was so full of hate and anger it could swallow galaxies, yet it felt dead. Utterly, completely cold. As if nothing in the universe had value, least of all me.
My heart tried to beat its way out of my ribs. I didn't think. I just reacted. I slammed the connection shut, yanking my consciousness back into my own skull with a violence that made me gasp. I pulled my presence in the Force as small and tight as a fist, trying to vanish.
Hah...hah..hah
What the absolute fuck was that?
My first, frantic thought: Did I do it again? Did I poke some cosmic horror sleeping in the galactic basement? Why is it always me? Why can't I just have a normal Tuesday?
This felt different from Her. She was alien, incomprehensible. This... this felt different. Human yet not fully.
And worst of all, it hadn't felt far away...
Force me damned...
Did Alderaan have some kind of monster in its basement? Was there a Sith temple under the pretty grass? I cursed every writer and comic book artist in my past life for not covering this. Some help my meta-knowledge was. 'Oh yeah, the galaxy is full of ancient horrors, good luck!'
I was mid-curse, trying to rack my brain for any scrap of lore about Alderaanian psychic predators, when hurried footsteps entered my Hyper Perception.
I focused, pushing past the lingering dread.
...Bail? Why was he here? Did the ship came already?
Wait, his emotions were a turbid mess—sharp anxiety, urgency. That was weird. The man was like a glacier of calm.
"Arachnae," I called out, my voice a little raspy. From the pilot's chair where she'd been happily loitering around, my spider-droid chimed and dutifully pressed the ramp control.
The very second had the ramp hissed open when Bail hurried in, his face a mask that was absolutely not delivering good news.
"Ezra, I have bad news." he said, and I braced myself for his next words. Did something happen to Obi Wan? Was ISB doing a raid here?
Despite dozens of scenarios running through my mind in that split second, his next words still shattered my expectations.
"Vader has arrived here, on Alderaan."
BOOM
Oh.
Oh.
You know that feeling when the world goes sharp and silent? When all you can hear is the ring in your ears and the thud of your own heart, suddenly hammering so hard it hurts? You try to think, but your mind is just static. You try to move, but you're frozen.
Yeah. That was me.
Darth Fucking Vader.
Fuck me...
That was him, wasn't it?
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A/N: Thanks for waiting till now. I know it's been a long while since I posted but good news is that I have plotted out the plan for next 10-20 atleast.
So in that time period I can atleast assure you that updates would be regular atleast.
Don't forget to give a couple of power stones to the book lest it gets forgotten away.
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